I’m deeply cynical about whether these were diamond. The guts is, the rock in NZ is simply too young to contain diamond. You would be very hard pressed to convince me otherwise…
At a talk some time ago we were informed that the closest to diamond bearing rocks in New Zealand that we have are at Kakanui and the only reason that they do not contain diamonds is not age but the depth underground at from which they originated.
Gidday Lammerlaw, agreed. I guess age and depth may have some correlation, as I understand there were two distinct geological periods where diamond predominantly formed, where magma from deep down penetrated the crust to bring material to or near to the surface. NZ was not around during either of those two periods hence both depth and time have an interplay here. Not sure how true that is, a first class honors major in geology told me that when I was bugging them so it could have been condensed but sufficent to make me stop asking more. The short answer is, there are no diamonds in NZ.
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I’ll keep this spot secret then.
Another few months and I’ll be able to buy Europe 
20x mag
So, MudWiggle, I will bite…assuming these are yours and from NZ, have you had them tested for hardness or assessed by an independent expert?
How many tonnes do you want?
I reckon this is what the ‘diamond’ rush was based on, some shyster probably found tetrahedral quartz washing out and cashed in. We’ve had several clay samples over the years from Mt Somers, they all had similar quartz crystals in them - but no carbon with its atoms all aligned nice and fancy.
The qtz crystals we get in the quarry here are all pretty much uniform and just over a mm in size
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I suppose I can always dream . I will mean while stick to my gold finding aqnd panning. 7.2 grams in 4 days , I know not much so lets put in in perspective that is about 1.5 tanks of fuel in my 6.5hp motor. I have fun playing round gets me out of the house. no water left in the creek so I will take the traps out for a possum might be more money in fur. might get lucky and get a beaver
Oh boy I just LOVE furry beavers! In fact when it came to the hunt I was a beaverholic!
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All I ever got was a gutted hedgehog…
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I could almost gaurantee that there are diamonds in New Zealand! They would not be of much use but nano diamonds have been found in areas where microspherules have been found, in glaciers in Greenland and elsewhere.
I lay claim to having found microspherules in new Zealand and years ago now had them analysed - (an interesting word that. As a young fellow I thought it meant 'having been subjected to the attention of a homosexual!) - in an electron microscope as being slightly magnetic and carbon in origin. The nano diamonds have been found associated with them.
I had found clear pieces of something was was definitely not quartz but decided that it might be small topaz but now I am wondering
So you never know - we might have diamonds here after all - but useless ones!
SEM/TEM won’t differentiate/identify magnetic or carbon…
There’s plenty of opal scattered through NZ though.